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When Joe showed up he was quite a site--he was unlike anyone I had ever met. He pulled up in a rusty, old Japanese car. He introduced himself, explaining proudly that I could call him Yellow Joe, a moniker he had picked for himself. In China yellow is the color for pornography, much like we use the color red in The West. He was quite skinny, had a swath of course, dark facial hair that didn't quite qualify as a beard, and when he walked his long arms and legs moved in a manner that suggested he was paddling through the air.
He told me to hop in the back because the passenger seat door was broken. He was wiping perspiration from his face as we got in the car. He explained that he was allergic to the heat so he had to take unusual steps to remain cool. With that he picked up a plastic bottle with a nozzle from the seat and started spraying a mist of water on his face and chest. He gunned the car out into the sea of traffic and proceeded to explain his connections to the CIA in a very uncovert way--all the while spraying his face with water and yelling what I would later learn were Chinese swear words out the window at other drivers. As a matter of fact they may be following me right now, he added without really clarifying who "they" were. Over the next few months I would find out that Joe was a nice guy. He set me up in the house where he was renting a room and showed me around the city. He was an interesting character who loved to tell stories that he gave every appearance of believing no matter how fantastical. And he was a paradox: He was one of the guys who had gone "native;" he was a cast-off from The States and he would very likely never make his home there again; when I arrived he had lived in Taiwan five years but knew only a couple Chinese words other than the hundreds of swear words that he regularly delivered with relish.
Joe introduced me to the city and showed me where to get a cheap bowl of noodles. He also brought me to the local expat pub called The Frog which was really an open air teahouse that served San Miguel beer and played loud Western Music. This is where newcomers make their debuts. After a few nights at the pub you are categorized and filed. The easiest classifications are American-Canadian, Commonwealth and former Commonwealth, or Continental. Certainly some people are crossovers but that is a starting point. One significant sub-grouping which welcomes all comers is the drunks club, especially prominent at the pub not surprisingly. Musicians form another group, but nothing says they can't belong to the drunks club. English teachers comprise yet another significant sub-set, and the pub fills up quickly every evening around ten after night classes end for a few hours of shop talk. Other groups include the engineers, the shoe company execs and some of the guys who have gone native who do not let that stop them from making appearances at local watering holes.
Taichung's expat community is small enough that most of the long-term residents--by that I mean a year and over--have at least a passing familiarity with each other. The one group that moves in and out fast are the travelers, who find Taiwan a convenient spot for refueling the wallet with cash. Taiwan has an insatiable demand for English teachers. Office buildings throughout the island are filled with countless bushibans. Every weekday streams of chattering uniformed high school kids leave their campuses and head for these nighttime language schools, only stopping quickly at push-cart vendors and small noodle shops for a snack to get them through the evening.
A quick glance at the help-wanted section of The China Post or The China News--the island's two English language newspapers--sets a prospective teacher up with a number of phone numbers to get a job. There are three types of jobs available: tutoring a private student, which is a difficult to line up but quite lucrative; working in the kindergartens, a job that calls for singing songs and playing games with little kids; and the bushibans, which provide evening lessons for teenagers and are also known as cram schools.
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